Knowledge management systems success in healthcare: Leadership matters

To deliver high-quality healthcare doctors need to access, interpret, and share appropriate and localised medical knowledge. Information technology is widely used to facilitate the management of this knowledge in healthcare organisations. The purpose of this study is to develop a knowledge management systems success model for healthcare organisations.

A model was formulated by extending an existing generic knowledge management systems success model by including organisational and system factors relevant to healthcare. It was tested by using data obtained from 263 doctors working within two district health boards in New Zealand.

Of the system factors, knowledge content quality was found to be particularly important for knowledge management systems success. Of the organisational factors, leadership was the most important, and more important than incentives.

Leadership promoted knowledge management systems success primarily by positively affecting knowledge content quality. Leadership also promoted knowledge management use for retrieval, which should lead to the use of that better quality knowledge by the doctors, ultimately resulting in better outcomes for patients.